In a bittersweet ceremony held on Sunday, June 23, the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh broke ground for a memorial and a new Tree of Life building. The synagogue was the scene of a mass shooting on Oct. 27, 2018, when a gunman opened fire and killed 11 worshippers.

The building will house a sanctuary for the Tree of Life congregation — one of three congregations that were meeting at the synagogue at the time of the shooting — also an education center dedicated to combating bigotry, and a museum chronicling the long history of antisemitism in America.

The museum will be the first in the United States dedicated exclusively to the history of antisemitism in America, from colonial days through the hard-line anti-immigration  politics of the mid-20th century to the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, VA, in 2017.

In a star-studded Tony Awards night, Jewish winners claimed many of the statues:

• Shaina Taub won for best book of a musical and best score for her musical “Stuffs.”
• Alex Edelman won a special Tony for his show, “Just For Us,” in which he chronicles his infiltration into a neo-Nazi meeting.
• Winners for directing included Danya Taymor, niece of Julie Taymor, for “The Outsiders,” and Daniel Aukin, son of directors David Aukin and Nancy Meekler for “Stereophonic.”
• David Adjmi won the Tony for best play, “Stereophonic.”
• Daniel Radcliff won best performance by an actor in a featured role for playing Charlie Kringus in “Merrily We Roll Along.”
• Jonathan Tunik won for orchestrations of “Merrily We Roll Along.”
• Maria Friedman, director, and her sister Sonia Friedman, producer, won Tonys for best revival of a musical, “Merrily We Roll Along.”

In a landmark ruling this month, Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled unanimously that the government must draft ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students into the military, that no longer is there any legal framework to continue the decades-long practice to grant them blanket exemption from army service, The Times of Israel reported. The justices made clear they were not telling the state how many Haredi yeshiva students to draft or how quickly, indicating that the process could be gradual. But they warned the government that it must begin now.

The High Court’s decision means that after decades of political and societal controversy over the issue, there is now a legal obligation for young Haredi men to join their Jewish Israeli comrades and serve in the military.

This new reality has come about largely due to the confluence of two major events: The expiration of the original law allowing for blanket service exemptions, and the cataclysmic Oct. 7 Hamas attack and its aftermath, which threw into sharp relief the IDF’s need for more manpower. Currently, an estimated 63,000 Haredi men had been exempt from military service. The IDF has stated that it would be able to draft 3,000 Haredi yeshiva students in the 2024 enlistment year, in addition to accommodating an annual average of 1,800 Haredi men who choose to enlist

Imagine a Jewish resort in the mountains where graduate students are playing board games and children are splashing in the swimming pool. Senior citizens are listening to lectures under a larger maple tree. And all of this is going on in Yiddish. The Yiddish Vokh (Yiddish week), sponsored by the Yiddishist organization Yugntruf, has been hosting retreats like this for 48 years. Guests spend a week together steeped in Yiddish, on the grounds of the Berkshire Hills Eisenberg Camps in Copake, NY. This year’s event will be held from Aug. 16-22.    Yugntruf photo

When does Shabbat start on the moon? NASA has decided that the moon needs its own timekeeping system, so how will the moon’s now-nonexistent Jewish residents pray, light Shabbat candles, and observe the festivals?

The question is interesting because the Jewish calendar is beholden to the sun, and the sun appears and disappears at unusual times when you’re not on Earth. An astronaut on the International Space Station will see the sun rise and set 16 times every day, while a moon resident will go two weeks before seeing either one.

Will an observant astronaut on the ISS need to pray three times every 90 minutes, keeping Shabbat once every 10 hours? Perhaps the lunar Shabbat lasts for an entire month. Tell a prospective astronaut that he or she must pray 48 times a day and, likely, no one will listen, or will elect not to become an astronaut.

However maintaining some links to Earth times holds the door open for some form of interstellar Judaism; after all, diaspora Jews use a liturgy that is deferential to Israel’s agricultural cycles, although most of them have never been there.

Space Judaism may be a weird slurry of adapted ideas, forged by the brave human beings preparing our faith for its next journey.

Adapted from an essay in The Forward

by David Zvi Kalman